HOT PLATE: Soup Pt VIII - Bank’s Brewery by Tegen Kimbley
Wolverhampton Arts Centre
Private view Thursday 8th October 5:30pm - 8pm
Open 10:30am-4:30pm until 13/10
Banks’s Brewery
Tegen Kimbley’s residency as part of Hot Plate: Soup PtVIII comes to a close with her solo exhibition at the Wolverhampton Arts Centre in October. Following on from Shared Ground, Portraits from Digbeth, reflecting on community, individuality and shared identity within a changing urban environment, this show provides a brilliant conclusion to the residency as a whole.
Banks's Brewery was founded at the Park Brewery in Wolverhampton in 1875 by Thomas Banks and operated for 150 years before closing its historic production site in September 2025.
Tegen Kimbley spent the best part of 2019 documenting Banks’s Brewery, otherwise known as Parkside Brewery, Wolverhampton, alongside artist Tom Hicks (Black Country Type). Having brewed the infamous Banks’s Mild for over a century, the brewery had become an unmistakable part of the city’s landscape and identity.
The building had this sort of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory resemblance about it. Its unusual architecture of brick and corrugated green walls has a distinct place within Wolverhampton’s City skyline, as well as the smell of warm cornflakes bellowing out of it’s chimneys. Beyond the architecture, it was the people who brought the brewery to life, those who worked there and those who had grown up around it.
Pre-pandemic, the brewery was fully operational, providing an opportunity to document the building inside out, as well as the people that worked there keeping its spirit alive. The photographs became a record of the brewery at a particular moment in time.
Following its merger with Carlsberg Brewing Company in 2020, the brewery faced inevitable change and closure, with both its cask and keg operations coming to an end. Come 2025, the building was being slowly gutted, marking the disappearance of a significant part of Wolverhampton’s industrial landscape.
What began as an opportunity to document a much-loved local brewery has since become something more, a visual record of a place, its people and the memories attached to it. At a time when the building is changing beyond recognition, these photographs offer a way of preserving something of Banks’s Brewery as it once was, and its place within the history and identity of Wolverhampton.
“It feels like the right time to showcase such an important part of Wolverhampton’s history.” - Tegen Kimbley
Supported by:
